5-11-24 Follow up trip

After the prior week’s exploration trip, I knew the insect life was pretty abundant in the river so I decided to do a float a little later in the day and hopefully get into some bug activity the last few hours of daylight. The kids had t-ball in the morning and once that finished, I headed for the river. We had the boat launched by 1:30pm and did the same float as the prior week. My father in law, as well as my friend Jim joined me on this trip.

There wasn’t much bug activity when we started the float, so I set my father in law up with a nymphing rig and Jim threw streamers to start the trip. We anchored up in the same general area where Jim caught his nice brown the week before and picked the water apart for about 20 minutes. I was able to land 3 brown trout in the main channel where I didn’t move a single fish the week before fishing a jig streamer. All of the fish took a size 14 Frenchie, given all of the large mayflies I was finding in the water, I went with a bigger nymph than I normally do.

After working that water pretty thoroughly, we got back into the boat and anchored up next to a nice run. My father in law hooked into something that was giving him a good fight, it ended up being a full set up fishing rod! On the next cast, he caught a metal can, and then on the third cast, he caught a really nice brown trout! That was an action packed and laugh filled few minutes.

The insect activity wasn’t as great as we were hoping, we did get a small window when fish were taking sulphurs on top. We set up and Jim was able to deliver a great cast and fool a fish that came up and ate, unfortunately the hookset didn’t connect. He made a few more casts but didn’t have anymore participants before the bugs action slowed and fish stopped surfacing.

We continued to nymph and streamer fish down the river. My father in law was able to get some more fish in the net and Jim was having a blast taking smallmouths on the streamer. Every spot we anchored up and fished had a few trout that we were able to connect on, the whole time we were optimistic that the bugs were going to turn on, but they never did.

While Jim was rowing, I got in the back of the boat and threw the same D&D streamer that worked well the prior week. Given the clear & bright conditions, I wasn’t expecting much but was able to have one trout come right up to the surface and smash the streamer as it came flying out of the water. This is why I enjoy throwing streamers, even though it doesn’t produce as many fish as nymphing does for me, the takes are way more exciting.

I got back on the oars and Jim continued to throw streamers as well. He caught 4 smallmouth in a row and then finally had a beautiful brown t-bone the streamer. It was the nicest fish of the day and it gave me a great opportunity to test out my new macro lens.

We never did get into the dry flies we were hoping to, but the day was pretty exciting. Between the nymphs and streamers, we brought a lot of fish to the boat and a few really nice ones. We all came to a similar conclusion about the river, these browns seem to fight a little harder than normal. Not sure if it was just the day and the heavy flows, but based on the fight, each fish we landed fought like it was a few inches bigger than it really was. I feel like that’s a great sign of having a healthy fishery.